5 Chrome Extensions for Teachers – Part 2

If you are using the Google Chrome browser here are 5 more extensions that may be useful to you as a teacher.

Adblock for YouTube

If you are fortunate enough to not have YouTube blocked in your school district you may want to try this chrome extension. When you watch videos on YouTube an ad will sometimes cover part of the screen. Adblock removes these. Students do not need to be exposed to ads if we can help it.

Install the extension and when you are on YouTube you will notice the icon in the omnibox address bar. You can click on the icon to disable the extension if you wish.

Clearly

Clearly is an extension that shows up as desk lamp icon next to the omnibox. When browsing web pages with a lot of extra content Clearly will strip the page down to the article. Let’s focus on the learning. The business of some web pages is certainly a distraction.

BEFORE:

After:

Ruul. Screen Ruler

Ruul creates a floating on screen ruler to help you line up material when creating online content. We want our students to CREATE, the trusty ruler of old was helpful for this and now it is helpful in a digital world. Simply click on the Ruul icon near the omnibox and a ruler will appear on the screen.

Even if I do not use it as ruler, I can use it to bring students attention to where I am looking at on the screen.

Split Screen

Most likely your gradebook is web based. If you are having students fill out Google Forms or do other web based activities you will want to pull up your gradebook side by side with the other website. Usually I manipulate 2 windows to be side by side, but this Chrome web extension does it for me. Quick and easy.

Whitelist for Chrome

If you have a computer at a station you may want to restrict the computer to only viewing the webpage necessary for the station activity. While in general I am not a fan of blocking sites and instead educating students how to act responsibly I feel there is definitely a need for something like this. Whitelist for Chrome allows you to create a list of websites that can be viewed. Anything not on the list is blocked. You can create wildcards such as http://google.com/* so that students can utilize a particular site in it’s entirety. This can also be helpful for students who have been warned, their usage on their device can be limited for a period of time to help them to make better choices in the future.

10 Comments

I just started teaching so I’m kind of new to it. I like Split Screen for grading purposes (and other things). I didn’t even know they made teaching-centric extensions, and was very glad to find some. I have Split Screen installed to my torch browser, and I’ll check out the rest of these. Thanks for the tip!

During my classes, I usually put up several websites, usually news sites, on the projector for my students to look at. Using Clearly was a good solution for cleaning out the ads and unnecessary parts of each website. However, lately I’ve been using an extension from onedepth.com, which one of my students recommended to me. It records the sites that you look at while browsing, and then when your finished browsing, you can view snippets of each website that you’ve visited without all of the muck just like Clearly, but with the added bonus of it being an automatically created collection of websites that makes it so much easy during class when I don’t want to waste time inputting urls into the browser..

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